I refer here to Genesis 6-9.
We can give an educated guess for the date of Noah as around 6000 BC., if not earlier. By this time, the Children of Man had become horribly corrupt (ch. 6:1-8). They pursued every sort of hedonism imaginable. This included the birth of Black Magic, as an attempt to regain Adam's old authority over nature. Being late in the Stone Age probably, some of it would appear to modern eyes to be very advanced "science," including early experiments with metals.
From the biblical point of view, of more concern were these pursuits of power, which gave rise to a long legacy of spiritual experimentation. This opened the way to demonic presence in, and even possession of, human bodies. It is not explained how, but this was connected to the appearance of a race of giants: the Nephilim. The ambiguity of the Hebrew word makes it uncertain, but it would appear that they were both physically large and terribly intelligent, not to mention outrageously ambitious and brutal. They were people who transgressed the limits in every way. This manifestation of evil power among the Children of Man was enhanced by mixing with the Children of God, through seduction. To corrupt the godly became a major preoccupation of the Children of Man. They succeeded to the point where God decided it was time to wipe out humanity and start afresh.
The man Noah ("Serenity") must have been the last Child of God who hadn't surrendered to this madness. God told him he would have 120 years to prepare for a worldwide flood. He was to do two things: (1) build a boat large enough to carry a breeding pair of all fauna, along with the extended family of Noah, and (2) to prophesy of the coming doom to the corrupt society around them.
His instructions for building this boat included using cedar, a nearly indestructible wood that didn't weaken much from age or long exposure to water. Estimates for the size of this craft, based on interpretations of the term "cubit," generally run about 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high (137 x 23 x 14 meters). These turn out to be very stable proportions for a boat, but huge, displacing over 40,000 tons (36,300 metric tons). It may well have required 120 years for four men to build something that large using Neolithic ("new stone age") tools. Large as it was, many contend that the Ark would not have been large enough to hold a whole zoo, even allowing no room for the animals to move around. Include food for them, and it would seem preposterous. More than likely, though, many of the animals would have hibernated the whole time. The weeks of heavy rain, and the following flood, would have lowered the temperature for quite some time. God had planned this carefully. The animals on the Ark came to Noah at God's prompting; He would have chosen and prepared these animals completely.
As to the volume of water sufficient to flood the whole earth, recall the picture of very little land surface before the Flood. Geophysicists are quite certain that today's continental land masses were originally part of a single, smaller one. Even today, the continents bordering the Atlantic Ocean appear to be growing larger by virtue of uplift, while the circumference of the earth slowly increases. The crustal material of the earth is oozing up through a rift running the length of the Atlantic, hardening and pushing the continental plates apart.
We have already described the primeval thick global cloud bank. It would have been quite easy to precipitate the whole thing by a few well placed eruptions from the vast subterranean pool ("fountains of the deep") spewing miles into the sky. God precisely planned the timing when the heat and pressure in this subterranean pool built to the point of bursting through the crust. The accompanying earthquakes would have caused vertical displacement of the earth's crust, sinking many parts. It took quite some time to bring all of the cloud bank down, along with all that had gushed from below the earth's crust ("forty days" was a common Hebrew expression, seldom meant literally).
We have today evidence of flood strata at high altitudes all over the world; inexplicable, unless one takes this story seriously. The flood hid from Noah's view the relatively low pre-historic mountains by some 20 feet (6 meters). Under the cover of water, great upheavals of the earth's crust would have shifted some of the land upward again, as the plates pressed against each other. They would have crumpled and folded at the edges, creating today's mountain ranges. The single ocean of earth would begin to run off new land masses, carving deep new valleys in the process. It took birds to test the new situation. While a raven would be comfortable resting on floating carcasses, the dove was the key signal for Noah. She would only light in a tree or on the ground.
The boat came to rest somewhere in the Ararat Mountain Range. We believe this to be in modern day Armenia. The post-Flood world would have been drastically altered. The permanent cloud layer was gone, with blue skies and starry nights now. The structure of the earth's crust had also changed, but the results would be more apparent later. Even then, mountains would be much higher, and valleys much steeper. With the cloud layer gone, only to reappear temporarily as mere shadows of its former self, the world would now see significant temperature fluctuations, and varying weather patterns. It is doubtful the winds would have blown nearly as much, or nearly as hard before the Flood as they do today. For the first time, the sunlight could be refracted through the mist in the air to form rainbows.
Promptly upon exiting the Ark, Noah reestablished the worship of God. Noah had carried on the boat an extra set of "clean animals" (the selection later enshrined in Mosaic Law as kosher) to sacrifice in worship. The appearance of the rainbow occasioned God's promise that He would never bring a global flood again. He also promised that the weather variations would stabilize into a pattern of predictable seasons. He removed a part of the curse pronounced at the Fall: nature would become a little more cooperative in the effort to grow crops. No doubt this was backed up in part by the global redistribution of fertile soil as silt, carried by the Flood. God also promised that man would gain complete dominance over the creatures of the earth.
For his part, Noah was commanded to establish the concept of a civil code of laws, and severe penalties for violating them (9:1-7). This is variously referred to as the Covenant of Noah, the Covenant of Civil Order, and other terms, which covenant we examined in an earlier lesson. This was to begin with the community that would arise from Noah's three sons, Shem ("Authority"), Ham ("Hot"), and Japheth ("Expansion").
Apparently Ham still carried with him something of the corrupt culture developed by the Children of Man. When Noah had taken advantage of the new soil fertility to grow grapes, he was able to extract some juice and ferment it as wine. Even if Noah had tasted wine before, it would have been a long time since doing so. At any rate, he imbibed enough to get drunk. It's not exactly clear what followed, because simply being naked in one's home isn't condemned anywhere in Scripture. It would seem that the story as told was a euphemism for some form of sexual contact (see Leviticus 18, obscure references to sex).
The curse on Ham's family is also difficult to understand, since it focuses on his third son, Canaan. Once again we see a case of Hebrew narrative where the story includes only those details pertinent to the objective of the tale. Thus, we have here an incomplete record of the curse, due to the obvious emphasis a Hebrew writer would place on explaining why God could command death for the Canaanites. Moses was instructed to record God's wish that they all be slaughtered. It is obvious that they carried Ham's propensities. Today, we are hard pressed to find a culture with more disturbing religious practices than were common among Canaanites. Even the Greeks, with their immoral tastes, found the Canaanites despicable.
With this curse is also a prophecy of Shem's descendants becoming the channel of God's revelation, and that through them, Japheth's descendants would find God. Today, the Caucasian Gentiles (Japhethites) owe much to the Jews (Semites) as the source of Christianity.
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Ed Hurst
revised 06 December 2003
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